Andrew Young impressive yet inaffective.

I must agree with Christy when she said the kid who won the oratorical competition gave a much more convincing speech that did Andrew Young. Young start off strong, began floundering in the middle, grossly oversimplified many things, and ended weakly.

It’s my memory that Andrew Young did not so much advocate peace, but was rather apathetic to it. He did acknowledge, though very lightly as if he was walking on eggshells, that the war hadn’t quite gone the way the Bush administration wanted, but said, “hey, the economy needs oil.” Or was it that America or the world needs oil? At any rate, the implications are the same. He seemed to be subtly admitting what he felt was the cause of the war in Iraq. It is my impression that if you were able to talk to him one on one he would not be totally against the administration but would not be gung ho about it, either. He just seems to accept things as they are. I expected more emotion and opinions to come from someone who obviously had to fight very hard for his accomplishments.

Some others have posted saying the effectiveness of his speech was largely/partly due to his ability to adapt his speech to such a varied/possibly very conservative crowd. I’m going to disagree here. His speech seemed to lack a certain focus, for me. He touched briefly on a lot of issues without going into any depth with them, gave a variety of stories, “you can be anything you can dream” sort of thing. But what was the heart of it? What was the main point? It seemed so very scattered, broad, and skimming over the issues that I really didn’t walk away with as much as I would have liked. He stammered and paused and said, “um…” so much that he lost my engagement.

All this said, I do admire the guy. His ethos is phenomenal and he has the presence of someone you want to listen to. This could have been used to show us how he really feels about the issues at hand rather than giving us some feel good stories and a couple of remarks on war and peace. If MLK celebrations did only begin in Clemson four years ago and Greeville doesn't even acknowledge the day, perhaps he had some personal qualms with speaking too openly about touchy subjects in the dirty south.